A French sea-captain let his tongue wag over dinner, and New Zealand’s destiny took a different turn.
When Britain finally decided to make a colony of New Zealand, she sent Captain William Hobson (1792-1842) of the Royal Navy to North Island, as Lieutenant to the Governor of New South Wales in Australia. He landed at Kororareka (now Russell) in the Bay of Islands on January 29th, 1840.
The Dutch explorer ran across two islands in the Pacific of which Europeans knew nothing, but his chief desire was to get past them.
New Zealand came under British control with the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840; James Cook had charted its coasts in the 1770s, but Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had set the first European eyes on the islands, over a century before. As William Reeves notes, however, he was interested only in getting past them.